Everybody Curses, I Swear!

by Carrie Keagan

  Without a doubt, the word “cunt” has had quite a mainstream resurgence these days. And with each passing year, people have become more and more comfortable with it. Plus, various commercial industries have adopted it into their nomenclature, where its global applications have proven to be indispensable. Case in point, it’s hard to imagine how land surveyors and NASA scientists would describe a small distance without the exacting precision of “cunt hair.” And it’s highly doubtful that doctors could correctly diagnose patients suffering from a life-threatening squinting affliction without the essential accuracy of “cunt-eyed.” It’s unimaginable where modern seafaring would be today without the critical rope splice able seamen use to join two lines in the rigging of ships known as the “cunt-splice.” And it’s unthinkable just how vulnerable our armed forces would be without the invaginated flat soft-cover crash helmet with the technical designation “cunt cap.” And the list goes on. But in spite of its ubiquitous presence in trade and commerce, a majority of people still consider it to be the most scandalous word you can use in casual conversation.

  So, as you can imagine, if we go back ten years or so to when it all started, its shock value exponentially increases in the opposite direction. In the mystical realm of the celebrity interview, cunt is a rare and powerful creature whose appearance has always been regarded as more mythical than actual, much like the unicorn. So there I was, doing what I do, cussing it up with the celebrities and slowly but surely nudging the door open wider and wider. The big C had started to show up here and there in interviews, which was exciting, but for the most part in a context that hadn’t been making waves and definitely not at a big studio. At least, not yet.

  But that all changed when I came face-to-face with its awesome power when I was asked to cover a major studio movie starring well-known teen starlet Mandy Moore. Strangely enough, it wasn’t anything she did or anything I did that set the wheels in motion on a ten-year crusade that redefined the acceptance of the word “cunt” in an interview. The first domino to fall on the road to jubilation was my interview with a then-unknown actor named Matthew Goode. That’s where I discovered that in a celebrity interview, the mere mention of “cunt” had the same effect as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). It shuts everything down for miles!

  Mandy Moore was apparently so over being wholesome, and in need of a little more edge in her image, that she agreed to sit down with me to promote the Warner Bros. rom-com Chasing Liberty. Warner Bros. was one of the first major studios to take NGTV seriously and invite us to their junkets. It was a rare opportunity, and we did not want to fuck it up in any way. But finding the right balance between our format and their comfort zone was a bit of a process. Fortunately, they’ve always been incredibly cool and progressive-minded, which they continue to be to this day. I’ve always been very grateful for all our friends there who’ve stood by us. But in the early days, we gave them a scare, and in return, they gave us a heart attack.

  When the invite first arrived, I thought to myself, How cool! It felt great to be seen as a journalist who could increase your cool factor. Besides, “fuck”ing in my interviews was becoming so ubiquitous, even the most virginal stars were ripping off their chastity belts and dropping F-bombs. Now, Mandy wasn’t the type to smoke salvia or make a sex tape, so this was her big moment to rebel. But she was still hesitant. So we started easy and drifted into slightly deeper waters as she got more comfortable. When I asked her about a brief butt shot in the movie, she was quick to tell me she had a body double.

  “I’m a modest girl,” she explained. “And it was so funny the other day, some girl was like, ‘So I thought I saw part of your boob in the movie.’ I was like, ‘I don’t think so.’ And she’s like, ‘No, I did.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay … I’m not going to show my butt, but yet I’m going to show my boob? That doesn’t make sense, lady.’”

  Finally, when the time came for her to curse to plug the film, it wasn’t a sure thing. She looked nervously off camera to her reps for approval.

  “Go for it,” they mouthed silently, though I could tell inside they were all screaming, “JUST FUCKING SAY IT ALREADY.”

  So Mandy pulled up her big-girl panties. “I’M GOING FOR IT!” she said. “I apologize to Mom and Dad and stuff, but I fucking love this movie! Go see it! I feel so good!”

  I waited for some sort of alarm to go off. It didn’t, and then the room erupted in laughter. SAFE! Mandy seemed quite pleased with herself, and she had that look of the cat that ate the canary. Come to think of it, I probably did, too. I mean, if anything was going to go wrong, it was going to be in that room with her … Right?

  Believe it or not, at the time, Mandy Moore saying “fuck” was quite an achievement and enormously satisfying. This was still early on in my career and there was always the chance of inadvertently crossing the line, and with a straitlaced star like Mandy Moore, it could’ve gone either way. But for the most part, I wasn’t really getting into trouble with the studios for the word “fuck.” They mostly let it go because the celebrities seemed to like me and my anything-goes style of interview.

  I have to admit that the fucks flew so frequently that I worried for a split second that perhaps “fuck” had jumped the shark. But then I would think, Nah. Fuck is eternal, like the Olympic flame.

  After Mandy was done, I had one more interview left for the day with Matthew Goode, her adorable English costar. There was no pressure there. He was a noob, and I couldn’t imagine anyone giving a rat’s ass what went on in that interview. This was a few years before he would go on to become a household name, appearing in big movies like Watchmen and hit TV shows like The Good Wife and Downton Abbey.

  I remember casually walking into the room and meeting Matthew, who seemed like a typical nice British boy with a hint of a naughty schoolboy twinkle in his eye. Brits are, typically, great interviews. Contrary to their stuffy stereotype, they’re actually quite liberal with their expressions and funny. As we said our brief hellos, I remember thinking, This is going to be great. He was charming, he was cheeky, and we were going to be lifelong friends. So like I do in all of my interviews, I told him we were uncensored at the very beginning, and we were off. The interview was pretty basic; it wasn’t overly dirty but very suggestive. He dropped a few “fucks,” we had a few laughs, and at the very end when I asked him to plug the movie, he didn’t hem and haw like Mandy. He was a son of England. His heritage and pride were at stake. This was his first big Hollywood movie and his first big Hollywood junket, so he went for broke and effortlessly dropped THE BIG ONE:

  “All right, ya cunts, go see the movie!”

  I literally felt time stop and all the oxygen leave the room. At the same time, I was ecstatic; I gave Matthew a high five. There might have been some sort of an end zone dance, I’m not sure. I had popped my big studio cherry! It was my first “cunt” at a Warner Bros. junket in the history of NGTV! Of all the “cunts” that I have ever known, his was the most impactful.

  Getting anything in the realm of the cunt was always magical. I remember getting handed a slew of them, wrapped in a bouquet of loveliness, from the entire cast of The Lord of the Rings at one of the premieres. Not exactly the place I would have considered the “nexus of cunt.” But leave it to some of the finest actors of our time to make a meal out of the “filet mignon” of curse words. It turns out that during the holidays they put up a Christmas tree in one of the Winnebago trailers on set. Having nothing to decorate it with, they got creative and used the only ornament they had in vast supply: tampons. And thus the Cunt-e-Bago was born. Knowing there was nowhere else where this heartwarming holiday tale could be told but NGTV, each of the stars lent their voices to the chorus of “Cunt-e-Bago,” like it was a reimagining of the “The Twelve Days of Christmas” but with more cunts. So along with providing these actors with lifelong memories, Peter Jackson and J. R. R. Tolkien had also put the cunt back in Christmas. But as awesome as that was, it was a red carpet victory, which doesn’t hold a candle to the awesome
difficulty of a junket cunt.

  It was true that superstar Cher graced me with, “I’m a bitch with a capital C,” in an interview at a Fox junket, but she never actually said the word! So as brilliant as it was, it was a bit of a cheat. Especially if you’re a purist like me. This one, however, I heard with my own ears in a one-on-one interview at a junket: Matthew said “cunt!” It was an affirmation of everything we were doing. I was genuinely thrilled that celebrities were starting to feel comfortable enough that they were talking to me like they talked to their friends. Both Mandy and Matthew had talked to me like there weren’t any cameras in the room, which had always been my goal. The fact that it was happening had me leaving the room on cloud fucking nine!

  When I hit the hallway, I saw a team of people walking quickly toward me. Obviously, they were there to congratulate me on a job well done. Obviously, they were coming to tell me how happy they were that I was a woman in a predominantly male business, breaking down walls and doing things that nobody else was doing. I was overjoyed, but it quickly became quite clear that I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. Because by the time I got to the tape-check room, Matthew’s C-U-Next-Tuesday had started World War III.

  “Carrie, we have a huge problem” were the words that greeted me from the guy running the junket as I entered the suite.

  “Oh shit, are my tapes not working?” I responded, completely unaware that Rome was burning and I was the one who had, inadvertently, left the turkey deep fryer unattended and therefore responsible.

  “No, they’re asking me to erase your tapes,” he replied, with little emotion.

  My heart stopped. “Why? What’s going on?”

  “I’m not in charge; all I can tell you is they’re telling me to erase it. I shouldn’t even be telling you this.” (It was at that exact moment that I experience the faint odor of the proverbial shit that was about to fly past my ear and straight into the fan ahead. This was gonna get messy.)

  The Warner Bros. rep stormed in and came up to me in a fury, with veins popping out of her forehead, ready to tear me to pieces.

  “What happened in there?” she said in her sharp pantsuit.

  “What happened?” I responded. “You saw what happened. Amazing happened! I had a great interview with Matthew and we totally connected and it was super fun and—”

  She cut me off. “He said ‘cunt’!”

  “Yeah … but…” was all I got out before she continued. “He said ‘CUNT.’ The star of our movie said ‘cunt’ in an interview. Do you think that’s going to get people to go see it?”

  In my mind, I thought, Fuck yeah, it’s going to get people to go see it. People who probably wouldn’t have given this film a second look might think Matthew’s cool and worth a look. But it didn’t matter what I thought. Cunt was apparently Dutch for “game over,” which is what it felt like for me at that point.

  “We can’t let you show that. We’re going to have to erase these tapes, you know that, right?” My body sank in. Then she delivered the final body blow by intimating that we may no longer be invited to future junkets. UGH!

  I didn’t understand her anger. They invited us. They knew we were uncensored. We didn’t do anything outside of what we normally do. Plus, it was clearly spoken in jest, much like every other curse word in my interviews, ever, and I think that is the critical distinction here. There was nothing negative about what he said. Not only did he mean it in a super-friendly way but he said it in an even friendlier way. But, alas, no! An oral nuke had been detonated, and the power of clear thought had been demolished. Apparently, it was the first time anyone there had experienced a celebrity “cunt,” and nobody knew what to do.

  So the studio went to DEFCON 1, and my C-bomb was declared a “verbo-nuclear device” with the combined destructive force of both Fat Man and Little Boy. I can’t even begin to tell you how overwhelming that moment was. In the span of five minutes, I had gone from being “too cool for school” to pleading for my professional life in front of a firing squad. It felt like having an orgasm that gives you a stroke!

  “Please don’t erase the tape,” I begged. “I promise not to use it in our video edit.”

  She was skeptical and still irate.

  “You have to trust me,” I added. “I would never do anything to jeopardize our relationship.” And it was true. Anytime anyone—past or future—asked us not to run something, we stuck to our word and didn’t. Even when Thor star Chris Hemsworth shouted with abandon on camera, “Dear God, I have a hammer in my pants!” It was such a beautiful sound bite, maybe one of the best ever. His publicist had concerns about how it might be perceived given it was his first major film, and so, out of consideration, we didn’t use it in the video edit for the film.

  To their credit, and as much as they were angry, Warner Bros. didn’t end up erasing Matthew’s tape, and I wasn’t banned from their junkets. But it was a traumatizing, heated battle that could have destroyed my career. It wasn’t Matthew’s fault. The poor guy couldn’t have known that his little cunt would cause such a big row. In England cunt is thrown around like confetti. It’s not malicious—it’s actually a sort of jolly term of endearment between friends. And it’s been infused in their pop culture for centuries. Chaucer used it liberally in The Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare made cunt references in Twelfth Night and Hamlet. Sex Pistol Sid Vicious dropped it in his version of “My Way.” There are dozens of cunts uttered in the movie Trainspotting.

  But in America, cunt was still considered the scariest, most evil curse word of all, and if used at all, it was controversial. The first time it was said in a movie—Jack Nicholson called Ann-Margret a “cunt bitch” in Carnal Knowledge—people saw it as a sign of the beginning of the end of civilized society by heathen hippies. Since that watershed moment, “cunt” had been slowly making its way into the mainstream to varying degrees of outrage. Jodie Foster was told, “I can smell your cunt” in The Silence of the Lambs. Tom Cruise demanded, “Tame the cunt!” in Magnolia. Samantha called Carrie the C-word on Sex and the City.

  I remember getting an interesting perspective when I interviewed my friend, groundbreaking British filmmaker Edgar Wright, for his film The World’s End. Edgar, who rose to fame with his comedy/horror classic Shaun of the Dead, and I go back a bit. To give you a little background, we first met when he and his buddies, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, were doing press for Hot Fuzz, their follow-up to Shaun. It was there where we all met to shoot an In Bed With. They were all new to the whole major studio thing and trying to get their sea legs. Then the next thing they know, they’re lying in bed with me, talking dirty like they’re in a pub back home. Needless to say, I made an impression. There’s a casual vulgar nature to the dialogue in his films that makes them very accessible, and his characters feel real and relatable. I think my approach to interviews follows a similar path, just in a different medium, and I think that’s what sparked our friendship. That and our mutual love of the eighties British sitcom The Young Ones. If you ever get your hands on the special edition of Hot Fuzz on DVD, be sure to watch one of the extras called “The Fuzzball Rally,” and you’ll see some footage of that fateful day I bedded Edgar for the first time! I think they all liked me in the sack because virtually every time they did press after that movie, it included a stop in my bedroom. All except for this time, ’cause they didn’t come to LA.

  So on this occasion, our cuss therapy session ended up more insightful than usual. Edgar, who never shied away from profanity in his films, was getting an unusual amount of shit from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) for this one. It turns out that much like the “fuck” rule, which allows only one mention of the F-word in a PG-13-rated movie, his film was testing the limitations placed on the C-bomb in R-rated movies to amusing effect:

  Edgar: Rated R for pervasive language including sexual references; that’s all it says! There’s, like, violence in the movie, there’s exploding heads, references to drugs, and all the MPAA wants to talk about is …


  Me: Violent sex …

  Edgar: … because we say the word cunt three times.

  Me: Nice! (I high-five Edgar.)

  Edgar: I haven’t sworn at all today. I’ve been saving it all for you!

  Me: I’m not buying that at all.

  Edgar: I’ll just have a sudden, like, explosion of expletives.

  Me: I know that cunt has come out of your mouth at least once in the last twenty-four hours.

  Edgar: (Bursts out laughing.) It’s true!… You read the letter from the censors? I can’t use the C-word to …

  Me: Well, you can’t call me a cunt, but you can call Simon a cunt.

  Edgar: You can call me a cunt, but I cannot call you the C-word.

  Me: What if I am aggressive about it? You fucking cunt!!! (I playfully nudged to see if I could break him.)

  Edgar: (Desperately trying not to say it.) Yeah, but I’m not gonna say it …

  Me: So then it’s okay?

  Edgar: Umm, it’s not okay, but, like, so, I can’t say it to a lady though …

  Me: You cunt say it to a lady?

  Edgar: I can’t … I cunt … I can’t say it to a lady.

  When I interviewed Matthew, we were in a pretty puritanical moment in time. It was right around the same time as “Nipplegate”—remember at the Super Bowl half-time show, Justin Timberlake pulled down Janet Jackson’s black bustier and exposed her right boob for nine-sixteenths of a second, then blamed it on a “wardrobe malfunction”? A million people filed complaints with the FCC, and CBS was fined five hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the largest sum in history at the time.

  So even though I believe my “cunt flap” with Matthew was just bad timing, it was inevitable. It was an absolutely necessary event in the evolution of my brand as a progressive journalist and NGTV’s brand as a groundbreaking uncensored network. In time, the cunting spread across all the studios until none were cunt-free. In fact, it acted as a fire starter of sorts because once the cunt was out of the bag, everything else was possible. I think over the course of the next few years we accomplished more in our mission to take away the negative stigma that surrounded cursing and replace it with fun, humor, and perspective with the ever-present cunt. If anything, the word “cunt” acted like a machete, aggressively chopping away at preconceived notions of what was acceptable language in interviews. We were clearing away mountains and valleys covered in the dense mental foliage of self-censorship in the artistic community. In retrospect, Mathew’s “cunt” was without a doubt a transformative watershed moment.